Maybe it's a stupid question...

but do you think things just complicated the older we get? Or is that just how we feel the more present we are?

It's Sunday Morning...

and I have a few observations to make:

1) Salt-n-Pepa radio on Pandora might give many people one more reason to live.
2) Minivans are amazing. The more people you add, the better.
3) Ginger and Chamomile, my current favorite fix for "Fran Cough".
4) It's still cold here. That's just mean.
5) When you accept a situation, acting appropriately and cooperatively becomes SO much easier. Like, immediately. So if you feel frustrated about something, accept it. See what happens.

Basset Hounds running on a beach. Yeah. You just need to see this. Many thanks to Reid Hurley.

I will consider myself to have arrived in life

when I have enough gall, money, time, space and peace to actually get a dog.

You know, for those days when you want to feel like a lady.

The dress must not hang on the body but follow its lines. It must accompany its wearer and when a woman smiles the dress must smile with her. ~Madeleine Vionnet

Poetry and Paper Tigers.

Debate doesn’t really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope.... That’s something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.

SEAMUS HEANEY, Paris Review, Fall 1997

When in doubt, give thanks. Survey the surface of your life and then go deeper. There are worlds within people, within a song, within a face, within a breakfast. These intricacies are the things that make life, life.

We talk about perspicacity as the kind of thing a good coach needs to get better. It's something you can have naturally, but it's also something you learn the further you go along. You learn that a slight movement of the knee in on the first pull of a clean will snub the right muscle groups. You learn that the same loss of that movement on the push out of the bottom of the front squat will short-change the max clean.

We all learn to see as we go along. Until then, we are blind.

It's incredible to think about all the things you know without being able to voice them. I feel sometimes, that I have forgotten what that is like - to name a thing for what it is... in spite of your incomprehension of it, in spite of your fear of it perhaps, in spite of the fact that words, are like paper tigers.

I've been trying to write more poetry lately - mainly for the sake of recording some songs with a friend in the wee hours of the morning. The process feels so new, and so different than my oh-so-college-ey days back in the shed behind Mark Stevick's house. Sip a beer, pour out your words, or melt into someone else's.

Poetry, for me, is allowing a voice to speak that I am not aware of. The words fall to a page and seem to write themselves. The sounds drift together and create a harmony that feels self-taught. There is something in me that wants to speak and stanza to stanza, I let it.

Sometimes the words don't come and on those days... I know not to try.

Maybe relationships are like this... Maybe sometimes you realize it is time to call a thing what it is. Maybe sometimes you know there are no words and there never will be. Only sounds that cry like a baby, so vividly but without any clear meaning.

Either way, there is, in the mix, gratitude for the voice, for the sun, for those things you know are there even if you can't yet see them. Maybe that's called poetry. Maybe that's called faith.

"We're just holding on to nothing

To see how long nothing lasts."

-Beck, Paper Tiger

Mama said...

That you have to feel for folks when they're a little nuts because you never know what they've been through... and I've known people like that... and I've felt things for people like that and then felt taken advantage of... and I've also been that person.

Situation #11

Today was a day for the latter.

Situations which I found myself in today:

Situation No.1 - I am trying to put more than 145lbs. over my head and it just isn't going to happen - and so I proceed to pummeling myself with a smooth combination of movements dubbed "1/2 Angie". Tried really hard to beat Chris and then he had to go and do 10 extra reps of the ab wheel rollouts and make a bathroom trip. Subsequently could not claim a solid victory. This is my life.

Situation No.2 - I follow the lovely Liz Edmonds to Physical Therapy and spend time wrapped in the sterilized viscera of bands and strange machines, old women with dislocated shoulders, and bulky men with plantar fasciitis. There are many thoughts of ball and socket joints. I feel like I am swimming in ideas and anatomy - tunneling through angles and physiology.

Situation No.3 - I am blessed to see a baby and maneuver around its mother's back trying to fix some aches and pains. I've never felt a back that wasn't loaded with all kinds of trouble. There is something assuring about being with a child, or being with a good friend - safe is a great feeling, albeit sometimes a fleeting one.

Situation No. 4 - Lunch with my beau in which I am distracted, both by gluten and my freaking phone. As per usual, he doesn't bat so much as a twitchy eyelid.

Situation No.5 - “It takes more courage to reveal insecurities than to hide them, more strength to relate to people than to dominate them, more 'manhood' to abide by thought-out principles rather than blind reflex. Toughness is in the soul and spirit, not in muscles and an immature mind.” - Alex Karras

Situation No. 6 - Walk home and be for all of half an hour.

Situation No. 7 - Take a cab a short distance and assure him I'll tip him well if he doesn't mind taking me for such small fare. Cabbie commences in discussing cab fare and how much I should tip him ("Some people just walk in and give me $20 to take 'em round the block."). He then picks up a homeless man into the front seat at Broad and Walnut while I am still in the cab and asks him if he feels like he's dying because the man wants to go the hospital. ________________. Needless to say I get out at Broad and Locust and throw eight big ones at the guy for a four dollar cab ride. Maybe I was trying to be ironic? I don't think I was trying to be nice.

Situation No. 8 - Running and skinning my knee on my way to grab coconut water, in the 5 year old way you do when you are trying to do a million things are really all you need is a nap. Ouch.

Situation No. 9 - Being engulfed by the push jerk, Metallica, and more of the same Angie. I think I literally saw stars about five times tonight as I coached. I felt like I had mothballs for teeth (there's an image, eh?)

Situation No. 10 - Sashimi, ok, and gyoza.... cause it was either that or wine... and the story of Rachel and Leah, but like, Jerry Springer style.

Situation No. 11 - Walk home with Sammy to find a vacuum cleaner chillin' in a homeless man's grocery cart. Because, you know - maybe he needs to clean some ish up on his life too?

Really though...

if I could have any dog and home big enough to let it run in...

it would be this one:

a six week old husky.

And while I'm at it, did you know that I have had two rabbits in my lifetime? Rabbit, the second, was Snowball (real creative, I know). He was left in Italy after we moved. Seeing as how I got him from a farm that farms rabbits to eat it was only fitting that I then returned him back to said farm when the time came.

Rabbit, the first, was named Snowflake and, I am sorry to say was starved to death on account of my family missing our flight and his running out of water in his own little home. :( I dug a grave around the blackberry bushes and buried him, headstone and all. Even now I can remember visiting Snowflake's grave before I left Tremestieri Eteneo for the last time.

On a perhaps entirely unrelated note... Arrus and I went to The Dandelion Pub one day and I loved the atmosphere and I ate the scallops... but Arrus had the rabbit pot pie and let me tell you... it was good.

Very much into Tea lately.

I would totally go through the trouble of special ordering the herbs below to try this tea from Elana's Pantry. Been loving herbal teas as of late - made ginger, raw honey, and cinnamon this morning and it was the peeeerfect start to the day. I seriously think it probably helped me PR my press :)

And it's also just worth it to run through some fun little photos of tea. Making tea... well, making tea is just obviously something so needed in the world.

There is no trouble so great or grave that cannot be much diminished by a nice cup of tea. ~Bernard-Paul Heroux

Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Lewis Carroll

Tea is drunk to forget the din of the world. ~T'ien Yiheng

I love the idea of mixing your own herbal teas... forgive me, but it's like drinking art.

Mint tea. Reminds me of Tea-o-3.

Find yourself a cup of tea; the teapot is behind you. Now tell me about hundreds of things.

Saki

It's so true.

And this is a beautiful moment.

And even just tea cups WITHOUT tea in them are soothing!

Each cup of tea represents an imaginary voyage.

Catherine Douzel

A Proper Tea is much nicer than a Very Nearly Tea, which is one you forget about afterwards.

A.A. Milne

Startled.

“To love is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.”

- Emily Dickinson

When I was younger and could not think of things to journal I would simply write what I had been learning lately. Here's what I have been learning...

1. I have never been in love long enough to know what it is like to really hurt the person you love.

2. Muscles can be tight. Joints can be tight. All of this and more can be mended.

3. It is so incredibly important to balance the mind, the soul, and the body. This lack of balance is the cause of most of my problems.

4. I'm not THAT great at cooking, but I do love food.

5. I can be mean when I'm sleepy - therefore I should sleep a lot more.

6. It's so important to be an individual in a relationship - to not lose the wanderlust that comes with being on your own. I really think it's what's best for everyone involved.

7. Grudges, just like death and taxes, are a sure thing in life. The practice of letting things go is just that, a practice.

8. Every body has a reason for being who they are, and for doing what they do. This is an old one, and simply a reminder.

9. New relationships are inevitable - what you do with the old ones is up to you.

10. I miss school sometimes - enough probably to go back sooner than I thought.

A Little Longfellow for your Tuesday Morning reminds of what it's like when you aren't around.
from "A Gleam of Sunshine"

But now, alas! the place seems changed;
Thou art no longer here:
Part of the sunshine of the scene
With thee did disappear.

Though thoughts, deep-rooted in my heart,
Like pine-trees dark and high,
Subdue the light of noon, and breathe
A low and ceaseless sigh;

This memory brightens o'er the past,
As when the sun, concealed
Behind some cloud that near us hangs
Shines on a distant field.